CUTTING CACTI

Above is a photograph of our scribe walking in Arizona, in the Sonoran desert last month. Actually the area is designated the Sonoran Desert National Monument, though it doesn’t look very different from a lot of nearby territory that isn’t designated.  The best thing about the Sonoran desert, and about much of Arizona, is the presence of saguaros, the archetypical, anthropomorphic cacti.

As I walked I had some idea of finding the perfect saguaro specimen, the most human, the one with arms posed most convincingly at its sides.  This wasn’t so easy.  I’d see one in the middle distance and I’d walk towards it but I’d soon see it wasn’t quite the archetype I was looking for, the angles of the arms would be wrong, or what looked like a two-armed cactus from a distanace turned out to have an extra arm when I got closer.  But then I’d see another, apparently more perfect one, not so far away and I’d walk towards that one, and it too would let me down, and then I’d see another … and so on.

There were other imperfections too.  The chances of finding a saguaro in anything like perfect condition, without scars or wounds or dead patches, was very, very low.  But you know that made them kind of human as well: just like people they get beaten up and damaged by the years, by what we might as well call nature.

And another thing I like about the Arizona desert, actually about deserts in general: the long, long, multi-engined freight trains.   As you’ll find if you walk right up to the tracks, and certainly there’s nothing to stop you walking right up to the tracks, these are vast, thunderous, threatening things, but when you see one of them in the distance, snaking its way through the landscape it seems positively serene.

I was not on a very adventurous walk – I just strolled around for an hour or two, with no end in mind beyond looking at trains and cacti, but as I was heading back to the car I saw this thing:

Tires, chunks of wood, some kind of cord holding it all together: it would be easy to see it as random detritus, or even (at a pinch) desert folk art but in fact I happened to know what it was because I’d read an article a couple of weeks in California Sunday Magazine.

The device was almost certainly used in the process of “cutting for sign,” a tracking method and an old Native American trick.  You smooth out the dirt road with tires (the Native Americans didn’t have these, of course) and then if anybody walks there you’ll know about it. 

I assumed the Border Patrol had been involved, tracking illegal immigrants, although also desert flaneurs like me.  It also occurred to me that we were some fifty miles from the Mexican border, which seemed a bit late in the journey to start tracking anybody.  But of course the walking was the end of the journey, the walkers had made it this far by riding the freight trains. 

WALKING WITH BEESTS

Like me, you’ve probably been hearing a lot recently a lot about Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests – kinetic sculptures that are also walking machines, though both those terms feel somehow reductive.

Here’s Lawrence Weschler in the New York Times magazine:

“Jansen began trying to model the mystery of walking by deploying stick figures … ‘In its essence,’ he said, ‘'walking is simply constantly changing your shape in such a way that you move forward. But how exactly does it work?

“In the midst of these cogitations, as Jansen himself was walking along the Scheveningen shore one day, the thought entered his head that maybe he ‘should pay a visit to the Gamma hardware store and check out their plastic tubing.’”

The rest is a kind of history, involving much trial and error, and an awful lot of mathematics and eventually he made these fabulous creatures and made them walk so that look partly like insects, partly like a synchronized if slightly ramshackle chorus line.  Nothing ramshackle about the Tiller Girls below:

  The great thing is, the Strandbeests don’t actually look like machines, much less robots.  They look - that dubious word – organic, and they certainly have a life of their own, at least when the wind blows.  Jansens actually says. “they walk on the wind.”

         That phrase of Weschler’s “In the middle of these cogitations” is an echo, deliberate I don’t doubt, of Robinson Crusoe.  Crusoe has found the footprint on the beach – a sign of something, though inevitably not of walking, and having run through various unconvincing attempts to explain it to himself, he says, “In the middle of these cogitations, apprehensions, and reflections, it came into my thoughts one day that all this might be a mere chimera of my own, and that this foot might be the print of my own foot, when I came on shore from my boat.”  He’s wrong about that of course.  And I find it interesting that Weschler uses the fancier “midst” while Defoe was happy with “middle.”

There are a lot of still photographs of the Strandbeests around, and there’s even a book with images by Lena Herzog, spouse of Werner, but the stills really don’t convey the strangeness or the wonder of Jansen’s creations. 

Click on the link below to the Strandbeest site and see them for yourself:

http://www.strandbeest.com

STREET HASSLE, NO NOT THE LOU REED KIND

When I was writing The Lost Art of Walking I interviewed a few “street photographers” including Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden.  My simple theory being (simply) that street photographers take a lot of pictures of people walking, and in order to do that they themselves have to do a fair amount of walking too.

One photographer I wanted to interview but didn’t, was Bill Cunningham of the New York Times.  Word on the street, i.e. a couple of people I knew at the New York Times, reckoned that even getting to speak to Bill Cunningham, or at least getting him to speak to me, could be a years long project in itself.  They may have exaggerated, but Richard Press, the director of the documentary Bill Cunningham New York, says much the same.  In the booklet accompanying the DVD (which I watched over the holidays) he says it took him 10 years to make the film: 2 years to shoot it, and before that 8 years to persuade Bill to be filmed.

Every Sunday the New York Time contains two features by Bill Cunningham.  One is Evening Hours, and it’s pictures of New York “Society” people at various events and parties.  The whole thing gives me the heebie-jeebies and I wish it were some kind of lacerating view of the vacuity of “Society,” but it just isn’t.

The other feature is titled On the Street, and consists of photographs of street fashions on the sidewalks of New York.  The people here may be vacuous too I suppose, but the end result is wonderful.  The whole project is obsessive and exhaustive and an act of supreme, sustained observation and visual collecting (maybe even that hideous word “curation”).  One picture of a woman in leopardskin may not mean much; but 30 pictures of women in leopardskin that means plenty.

The documentary shows Cunningham on the street taking photographs (he generally favors photographing women rather than men, but not exclusively) and there’s nothing furtive about it.  He just takes pictures, without permission in most cases as far as I can see, sometimes even chasing people down the street.  Most of his subjects seem happy enough to be photographed: some of them in fact seem to be models, either professional or aspiring.  One or two may look absurd in the photographs, but Bill Cunningham hasn’t made them look that way, they did it all by themselves.

Wathing the film it was hard not to be obliquely reminded of that recent video, made by Hollaback! “a nonprofit dedicated to ending street harassment” showing an actress being hassled as she walks on the streets of New York.  

And I suppose Cunningham does harass some of his subjects.  We all know the horror of the male photographic gaze.  However, the documentary shows that he has enormous charm and warmth, and it probably helps that he’s such a benign and sweet looking old man.  And age may have a lot to do with it.  Certainly he’s the least threatening presence you could encounter on the streets of New York. 

Cunningham alas is not a true flaneur since he rides from place to place on his bike, though he does plenty of walking when he gets “on site.”  And these days he’s sufficiently well known that people take photographs of him as he’s working, maybe they even harass him.  Yes – people walking on the street, take photographs of Bill Cunningham walking on the street, taking pictures of people walking on the street.  I like that: I like that a lot.

WALKING INSTRUCTIONS

Over Christmas my Facebook pal, Susannah Forrest, horsewoman, author of If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of an Equine Obsession, and also (unlike most of my Facebook friends) somebody I’ve actually met in the real world, posted that famous quotation from Camus: “Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” 

As you may be able to see above, it was from a site named Saddles for Soldiers, and in this case was actually referring to walking with a horse – great advice I’d think, and I imagine you definitely wouldn’t want to be walking behind one.

I found it quite difficult to find a picture of Camus walking, but imagine my joy at discovering this one, with a horse, in which I’m not sure that he’s following his own advice, but maybe he thought it didn't apply to horses.

In any case that Camus quotation got me thinking about The Instructions of Shuruppak, a Sumerian text from about 2,600 BC, and one of the oldest known texts in the history of the world.  Naturally I wondered if it had anything to say about walking.  It does, kind of.

It advises, “You should not buy a prostitute: she is a mouth that bites. You should not buy a house-born slave: he is a herb that makes the stomach sick. You should not buy a free man: he will always lean against the wall. You should not buy a palace slave girl: she will always be the bottom of the barrel. You should rather bring down a foreign slave from the mountains, or you should bring somebody from a place where he is an alien; my son, then he will pour water for you where the sun rises and he will walk before you.”

See – not beside, because he isn’t a friend, and not behind because you don’t want him wandering off when you’re not looking, but in front of you so you can keep your eye on him.  Timeless advice, I’m sure.

And that got me thinking about the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a much more recent text than The Instructions of Shuruppak, and actually a whole group of texts, written by different hands over a period of at least a thousand years.  The best bit, I think, are the spells designed to help the soul as it passes through the underworld.  It includes a spell for ensuring an eternal supply of food and beer, and also one about walking.  It doesn’t say anything about walking in front or behind or beside, but it does say this: "You will enter the house of hearts, the place which is full of hearts. You will take the one that is yours and put it in its place, without your hand being hindered. Your foot will not be stopped from walking. You will not walk upside down. You will walk upright.”  Which I would think is very, very handy.